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The Spaces We Inhabit

January 9–February 12, 2025
Laura Villarreal
Curated by Sofía sánchez Borboa

As winter's muted tones settle over Michigan, The Spaces We Inhabit brings warmth and color to the De Pree Gallery, transforming it into a dialogue between the season's quiet stillness and the lively interlaced forms of Mexican artist Laura Villarreal. Her site-specific installation, woven from thread, reimagines the gallery's architecture, filling it with layers of movement, texture, and memories. As the artworks stand in stark contrast to the bare, dormant landscape outside, the exhibition invites viewers to step into a space where the concept of home is both familiar and newly animated by her vision.

Drawing inspiration from the layered textures of some of her family's houses in Monterrey, Villarreal's work is a meditation on home and remembrance. She explores their worn walls—a space marked by time and shifting fortunes—as a symbol of endurance to transform the gallery's surfaces into an immersive installation that reimagines structure and form. Throughout the performance video, the viewer can see Villarreal enact a quiet ritual, washing a weathered wall, turning this simple gesture into an act of unveiling the layers of memory. Her intervention captures the ways in which social and temporal imprints mark the spaces we inhabit, layering them with memory, culture, and history.

Through The Spaces We Inhabit, Villarreal invites us to see the places we reside in as more than structures—as intimate repositories of memory, heritage, and strength. This exhibition offers a moment to reflect on the warmth we carry within and the histories that resonate in our concept of home—especially during wintertime when most of our time is spent indoors. It is both a celebration of resilience and an invitation to connect with the quiet strength that binds us to the spaces we hold dear, transforming the gallery into a contemplative realm of home.

Artist Biography

Laura Villarreal (b. Mexico, 1971) works and lives in Miami, FL. She is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of fiber, painting, and photography. Through the use of embroidery, paint, and textile on paper and canvas, Villarreal creates a transdisciplinary language and poetry inspired by the vivid colors and ancient traditions of her Mexican roots. In the late 1990s, she immigrated to the United States, a process that underscored the economic and social disparities between the two countries. Creating tensions among her multimedia works, Villarreal integrates both environmental geographies in her life, questioning issues of identity, sense of place, longing, and memory. Villarreal holds an MA in Analysis and Management of Contemporary Art from the University of Barcelona, Spain. She studied at the University of North Carolina, the New York School of Visual Arts, and the Art Students League in New York. Select individual exhibitions include the Instituto Cultural de México in Miami; the Embassy of Chile in Washington, DC; the Centro Cultural Plaza Fátima in Mexico; and the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. She has participated in Parc Lima, Chaco Chile, and Pinta Miami. She has curated for the Mexican Cultural Institute in Miami, part of the Consulate dedicated to the promotion of Mexican artists in the US, and currently directs art education programs for young audiences in Key Biscayne, FL.

Curator Biography

Sofía Sánchez Borboa (b. Mexico, 1992) is a distinguished Mexican curator. She has held exhibition-making roles at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City; the Sullivan Galleries; and the Field Museum in Chicago. With over 20 independently curated exhibitions, her work emphasizes immersive, interactive art experiences that often center on storytelling, identity politics, and cultural memory. She holds a bachelor's degree in Art History from Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm and a master's degree in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently, she published Anyone Who Has Never Been Bored Cannot Be a Storyteller, a fragmentary narrative of Coyoacán, Mexico City.

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